Kamboja

A frontier people

The Kambojas occupied the country beyond Gandhāra, in the Kabul valley, ancient India (modern-day Afghanistan), and the hills north and west of it. Indian sources treat them as at the edge of the known world and slightly outside it: Yāska notes that a verb used by the Kambojas in its ordinary sense is used by others only in a derived form, an early and unusually precise observation about dialect difference.

They are consistently associated with horses. The Mahābhārata and the Arthaśāstra both name Kamboja among the sources of the best breeds, which fits a people living on the routes into Central Asia.

Government

The Arthaśāstra places the Kambojas among the corporations that live by both arms and agriculture, and other sources describe them alongside the clan polities rather than the kingdoms, which is why they are conventionally classed as a gaṇa-saṅgha. Certainty is not possible; the descriptions are brief and were written at a distance.

In the edicts

Aśoka names the Kambojas, with the Yonas and the Gandhāras, among the peoples of his borderlands in the fifth and thirteenth rock edicts, in passages that distinguish them from the ordinary provinces. The northwest, where Aramaic and Greek versions of his inscriptions were set up, was administered with a recognition that its populations were not those of the Ganga plain.

After the Mauryas the name persists in inscriptions and literature but attaches to a shifting set of peoples, and later usages cannot safely be read back onto the mahājanapada.